How new gardening workshops for novices are growing vegetables - and a community

When Diego Combita arrived on P.E.I. three years ago from Colombia, he became intrigued with the Island climate.

Growing up in the countryside, he had always been interested in agriculture and gardening, so he wanted to learn more about the Island climate and the types of plants and vegetables that grow here. Then the pandemic hit and he couldn't find any gardening classes to join.

These days, Combita is part of a group learning about gardening every Tuesday at the Desbrisay Community Garden in Charlottetown.

It's a new, free workshop series offered by the P.E.I. Food Exchange geared toward novice gardeners .

"I decided to join [these sessions] trying to learn how to grow things because the climate here on the Island is very special, so you need to learn a lot about the varieties that you can grow here, and a lot of tricks and secrets to grow them," said Combita.

"After a full day at the job working a lot, this is kind of like a de-stress session. You feel better."

'A fun, relaxed introduction to gardening'

That's exactly how workshop facilitator Rhea Szarics hopes people will feel when joining the series.

She said these are not structured workshop series where attendees have to commit to most or all of the sessions. People don't need to register in advance — they can just drop in and do some gardening.

"It's just a fun, relaxed introduction to gardening that focuses less on specific skills and more on the day-to-day activities that you would do in your garden," she said.

"Attendees can follow me around. They can see what I'm doing, and sometimes I will ask them to join in."

For example, on Tuesday the participants were learning about weeding and starting seedlings.

Szarics started off the session by grabbing a selection of different hoes from the community garden's shed and explaining to the participants the pros and cons of each type.

They then went on to weed their plot, which the group started when the workshop series began at the end of May, and where they've been growing things like tomatoes.

As the participants weeded the plot, Szarics explained to them the purpose of the activity: to "make sure the plants you don't want to harvest, they don't compete with the plants that you do want to harvest."

"There is a tendency among novice gardeners who are really concerned about the health of their plants to weed everything very thoroughly and pick out even the smallest weeds, but ultimately that's not necessary," Szarics said.

Once their weeding was done, the group started working with seedlings.

Guided by Szarics, the participants planted different kinds of seeds such as lettuce in plug trays before covering the trays with vermiculite and watering them.

"When you first water the seeds that you started, ideally you should not dump a bunch of water on them because the seeds will sink really deep down, and then they'll have a hard time germinating," she told the group as they were watering the trays.

Szarics hopes that along with offering people a chance to gain new gardening skills, the workshop series will help connect them with gardening resources on the Island.

"I'm hoping that I can serve as a community navigator through these sessions," she said. "For example, if anyone has a question about where they can source seedlings, I can help connect them to those resources."

For Diego Combita, these gardening sessions mean something else.

For more than two years of the pandemic, he and his wife didn't have many opportunities to connect with other Islanders and didn't really feel a sense of community, he said.

That's why he's glad to join the gardening group every Tuesday.

"I am a new person to the Island, so I want to know other people, to interchange knowledge, to interchange experience. So it's important to create our sense of home here on the Island."